Although the speed of the internet connection depends almost completely on the capacity of the provider (i.e. the company we pay for having internet like Fastweb or TIM), on a Windows PC there are several ways to optimize the reception and transmission of data. It is basically a matter of adjusting some internal parameters of the TPC protocol of the operating system in order to optimize the network traffic according to the detected speed, a bit like one would do with a car engine.
Optimizing your internet connection means not only surfing faster, but also downloading faster from the internet, uploading and downloading from P2P programs such as Bit Torrent clients, seeing streaming video without interruptions, watching online TV channels at maximum quality, playing online without lag and so on.
To change the TCP network parameters in Windows (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and even Windows Server) you can use a convenient automatic tool that has been designed to optimize the speed of reception and data traffic on the ADSL network.
First of all, it is worth checking the real speed of the internet connection, so that you can make a comparison before and after the changes.
The program we are going to use is Tcp Optimizer, arrived at version 4 in 2016, compatible with Windows 10 and simple enough to use as we see in this guide.
After downloading it, without installing it, you must press the right mouse button on its icon in order to run it with administrator privileges, otherwise it will not work.
In the main screen, locate the “ Connection Speed ” section at the top and correctly set, in Mbps (Megabit), the maximum speed that is declared by the network provider, not the one detected by the speedtest, but the potential one.
SEE: Difference between Megabyte and Megabit and between MBps and Mbps
In the Network Adapter section, you need to select the network card that is used to connect to the internet.
If the names of the drop-down menu don't tell us much, go to the Windows network connection center to find out which network card has internet access.
When a specific network card is selected using the drop-down menu, its IP address will be displayed in the lower right part.
If in doubt, under the selection of the network card, there is an option to make the changes apply to everyone ( modify all network adapters ).
In this section you can also change the MTU value which should be set to 1500, with the exception of PPPoE connections (1480).
Optimal adjustment
At the bottom, where Settings is written, you can press the Optimal key and then Apply changes to make an automatic adjustment and complete the configuration immediately.
Customized adjustment of TCP Optimizer
Below, you can press Custom to manually adjust the various parameters including:
- TCP Window Auto-tuning : the TCP reception window in Windows A value too low in this configuration can limit high speed transfers and cause high latency therefore it must normally be set to normal.
Note: TCP auto tuning to "normal" should not be set if the connection speed is less than 1 Megabit per second (then it must be set to " highlyrestricted ", if using the remote connection (then it must be disabled) and then also if the connection speed is greater than 100 Mbps.
So if the connection was in fiber and had a speed equal to or greater than 100 Mbps, you could try using the experimental option and see if it works better than the normal value.
- Windows Scaling heuristic must always be disabled, so that Windows does not automatically change the TCP parameter.
- Congestion control provider can be set to the ctcp value
- The RSS (receive-side scaling) / RSC (R. Segment Coalescing) / DCA (Direct Cache Access) parameters can be enabled if you have a PC with a good processor, of the latest generation, with multiple cores.
- TTL (Time to Live) must always be with number 64 and determines the maximum amount of time in seconds (and the number of hops) that an IP packet can live on the network without reaching its destination.
- ECN Capability can be disabled
- Checksum Offloading enabled
- TCP Chimney Offload disabled
- Large Send Offload (LSO) disabled
- TCP 1323 Timestamps disabled
If you want to deepen the meaning of these values and also go to find out what all the settings of the Advanced Settings tab mean, I refer to the official guide for TCP Optimizer 4, even if it is written in English.
As far as the meaning of the MTU Latency card is concerned, I had already written a guide to reduce network latency for a faster connection .
After applying the settings, you can press OK on the summary tab, which shows us all the registry keys that are changed, the old values and the new ones.
If the program has been launched not as an administrator, you will see some entries with "access denied" written, because there are no rights to make those changes to protected registry keys.
After the restart, you can run the speed test again (at the same time and under the same conditions as before) to see if the internet speed has improved or not.
In case of problems or worsening, you can always go back to the TCP Optimizer and restore the default settings by choosing the Windows default setting (press Apply Changes ).
In addition to TCP Optimizer, if you are not satisfied, there is another completely automatic program that allows you to optimize the ADSL internet connection parameters and that, in theory, allows you to browse the web faster, with faster downloads and receiving smoother streaming is Throttle.
This is not a free software but it does not matter, you can try it for 30 days and, however, it must be used only once, it works or not, it can be removed anyway.
In case there are problems, Throttle can restore the previous situation so it can be used without fear.
Yet another tool to optimize the internet connection, which I liked a few years ago and which today can still be downloaded even if it has not been developed for some time, is Auslogic Internet Optimizer, described in another post, which allows you to increase internet speed .
For wireless connections, read, on another page, the guide to speed up the router and optimize the Wifi network.
Very interesting, then, the program to balance and manage the network bandwidth in order to assign priorities to one or another application by choosing what should go faster.
Wanting to work manually without using programs, we saw in another article 5 tricks on Windows to speed up the internet connection.
Finally, do not forget to change DNS on a PC, perhaps using Google DNS to browse faster.
READ ALSO: Check connection stability and ADSL quality
